As a technologist who also reads ancient Egyptian (from college) as well as Akkadian (== Assyrian & Babylonian, with slightly different scripts over the years) and Sumerian, I can fairly readily call shenanigans on this one. The sophistication of translation here is about as deep as the 'your name in hieroglyphs' stuff you find in museum stores and the horrid Dover reprints of Budge's books.

And don't even get me started on Sumerian. Professional Sumerologists still can't render half of the agglutinative morphemes that appear in Sumerian verbs.

As a technologist who also reads ancient Egyptian (from college) as well as Akkadian (== Assyrian & Babylonian, with slightly different scripts over the years) and Sumerian, I can fairly readily call shenanigans on this one. The sophistication of translation here is about as deep as the 'your name in hieroglyphs' stuff you find in museum stores and the horrid Dover reprints of Budge's books.

And don't even get me started on Sumerian. Professional Sumerologists still can't render half of the agglutinative morphemes that appear in Sumerian verbs.

I definitely agree with you on translating difficulties. When your last sentence was translated into English, most of it came out as gibberish!

Well, the destruction of antiquities after the American invasion was a crime against humanity -- not just a crime against one people, but against all peoples. This is not meant to be a political statement or belittle what the folks there are trying to do, but a horror all the same.

So, as an archaeologist and historian, I would say:

1) Take nothing, damage nothing. Buy no antiquities -- the black market in looted antiquities has exploded from the war and whenever a tablet is illicitly dug up and sold, it's lost its provenance and a significant part of its value to historians. Remember -- there's a finite amount of archaeological material out there and whenever something is looted, humanity's story is diminished. There are huge amounts that we know about the beginnings of civilization from single fragments. When they're lost, they're gone forever.

2) Tell your comrades to do the same. It's not just the current generation that will thank you.

3) Realize that you are standing on a land older by far than anything we know here in the US. Ur was ancient when Rome was a collection of huts on a hill. And when Ur was built cities around it were already in ruins. Uruk (Unug in Sumerian) nearby was where writing seems to have first originated, and was a metropolis of 40-50,000 people five thousand years ago. And in those very first written texts, so early that they're entirely pictographic and are more encoded bookkeeping documents than language, one of the prominent signs is easily recognizable as the (known later) Sumerian word DUL -- a mound, a ruin -- in these texts, a place unsuitable for planting because it was a city site already, at what we think of as the beginnings of history, old beyond time.

3a) And you'll know the word DUL well. It survives, through Akkadian -> Aramaic -> Arabic, as the word Tell, which you probably hear every day in place names where a site is built on older ruins piled up over the plains.

4) Lastly, when the full moon is out and hangs over the ziqqurat of Ur, whisper a prayer to Nanna (Sin/Suen in Akkadian), the Moon god who was the patron of the place, and whose temple that once was, and beseech him once again to restore peace unto his land and his people.

I'll second that with the note that one should look at the sources that McCormack is using for his history of Sumer section. Citing Woolley is great, he is one of archeology's giants, but I must respectfully question drawing conclusions from Waddell for any language model / history. His model of hyperdiffusionism has been long discredited among scholars. I will also note the general lack of citation of recent scholarship in McCormack's pages or any recent work linguistic work by reputable scholars.One should point out that our understanding of Sumerian history and language, especially, has changed extensively since the 1930's.I think an online English -> Sumerian / Akkadian reference is a great idea. The EPSD from the University of Pennsylvania is a terrific reference along those lines, for example.That being said, even if the scholarship in the engine were sound, machine translation is also in its infancy for languages that we _fully_ understand, let alone Sumerian whose grammatical structure is highly debated among scholars.

More or less. Turkish is usually used as a parallel for the agglutinative behavior of Sumerian (but n.b. there's no claim of a relationship between the languages -- despite many attempts (often on the fringe) to connect Sumerian with other language groups, it remains a strict isolate). Agglutinative affixes can go before or after the verb root, and vary based on which of the two forms roots come in (hamtu and maru, as defined by the later grammarians writing in Akkadian) as well as on the other parts of s

Actually in this case, it's the chicks who learned enough Sumerian to impress other people - they're a local women's choral group [zambra.org] who perform in something like 17 languages, because it's just not enough to do several different Gaelic-family languages and Bulgarian and Seneca or have the main dead languages you perform in be Latin and classical Greek. (I forget whether the Hebrew they do is ancient or modern, or whether Ladino counts as a dead language yet, but it's a relatively recent language either way.

I can confirm this. I know Egyptian. If you enter single words, you may get a reasonable translation back, though in several cases what I got is not what I would consider the usual word or spelling. If you enter actual sentences, however, the result is in every case gibberish. This system has no understanding at all of Egyptian morphology (conjugation of verbs etc.) or of Egyptian syntax. The verbs are not inflected, the words are in the wrong order. This is not a translation system, it is a crude dictionary.

I've been a fan of Ancient Egyptian language and religion for 20 years now. I know a few words off the top of my head, and it correctly translated them from English. This is far more sophisticated than "your name in hieroglyphics" tricks. For example, the word for "sand" can be transliterated as "sh-ah-y."... were it simply transliterating into Egyptian (as the "your name in hieroglyphics" mechanisms do), it would come out as "s-a-n-d" using the either Egyptian alef (hawk) or ayin (arm) for the A.

Machine translation sucks. Among other things, idioms, set phrases, wordplay, and most importantly the fact that there is rarely a one-to-one mapping between languages (often resulting in either a loss of information or requiring missing information to be added, which often requires knowledge of the culture of the language's people) all present challenges that make it unlikely that anything short of human-like AI (or very close) will be able to do good translations. Or to put it more briefly, "Nothing to see here. Please move along."

Doctorate in Ancient Languages: US$100,000A Library of reference books (including that moron Budge): $200,000Plane ticket to [redacted]: $500Knowing that you are the only one on the PLANET that can read this tablet (and you have to save the world AGAIN):

This translates only from English to those languages, making it far less valuable than the other way around.I have visited a number of websites over the years which did something similar, if perhaps not as accurately or to as many languages.

Also, this caught my interest:The website translator engine took approximately an hour to create, with the language database occupying two hundred hours to line up cuneiforms and hieroglyphics with text descriptors and make a hierarchy to prioritize the information.

Read the article, then go to the web site. The web site translates FROM English TO the other languages. So there are no secrets revealed here. Unless you plan on revealing your personal secrets to someone from 3000 years ago by sending them through some sort of time machine.

"Good evening. As a duly designated representative of the City, County, and State of New York, I order you to cease any, and all, supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin, or to the nearest convenient parallel dimension."

While the posting you're pointing to is funnier than this posting of mine (:-), what your comment reminded me of is the spam that I used to get lots of for some training company in Cairo that mostly does civil engineering. If I need to know the *current* regulations for casting liquified limestone in Egypt, they might be the people to go to, but they were so persistent for such a long time that I'd really have liked to cast their mail server in the stuff, and their ISP was the monopoly telco which had no i

This program reads itself in from stdin(claytablet), compiles a compiler, then writes itself back out to stddout(claytablet). User is required to ensure resulting program is properly baked to prevent data loss.

This program reads itself in from stdin(claytablet), compiles a compiler, then writes itself back out to stddout(claytablet). User is required to ensure resulting program is properly baked to prevent data loss.

As opposed to politicians who are half-baked at best?

Personally, I'm waiting for the Sumerian to English version of this turkey so we can read their political speeches & see we really haven't made that much progress after all...

The Only thing the "translator" does is taking an English word and match it with lemmata in a lexicon then it takes the first hit and then it goes on. Try typing "I have seen you" you'll get "[I] [have] [see]n [you]" it simply cuts of the "n" of seen and leaves it there because it can only find uninflected forms. This is less than nothing.

And by the way the statement "For best results, use simple words as language has developed a lot since the time of this ancient language." under translation is one of the most stupid things I have read on an academic page language dedicated to some aspect of language. They should just take a Sanskrit dictionary (or whatever... Maya... Classical Chinese). Language then and now is pretty much the same, but apparently in some places technology hasn't developed that much, grumblegrumblegrumble...

I tried a few basic phrases where I know (from graduate school) what the Akkadian should be. "If a man kills..." (shumma awilum idak, if I recall) from Hammurapi's Code. "For the gods" (ana ilani). "An adoption tablet" (tuppi maruti, all over the place especially in Nuzi tablets). Only a few words were represented correctly, and surely through the simplistic "this English word matches" method. I was shocked that even "kills" and "gods" were not rendered correctly. The script on the site tells me that terribly outdated sources were used.
Tried the same for a few very simple Egyptian phrases. "The city is in joy" (all over the place in Gardiner, 3rd ed) (result not too bad on this one). "The priest hears the god". What? No flag (n-ch-r, sign for deity)? Few years ago I researched how to write out "God is Love" and "God loves you" (for Vacation Bible School, the theme was archeology-past), and I scoured Gardiner to make sure I got the grammar just right. Oh heck not even close - only correct part was mr for love, but should be mrwt for the noun.
Don't get me on the Sumerian tests. Really disgustingly simple stuff from temple dedicatory inscriptions (I had just one semester of Sumerian). Well... got dingir for "god" but that's about it.
Sorry. 10/10 for good intentions... but minus several million for the results.
Sorry. 10/10 for good intentions... but minus several million for the results.

As a person who studied Latin at the high school and collegiate level, I know that much of what is 'worth' translating academically has already been translated by other academics. Sure, a scholar might be able to come up with his own unique translation, but that is not something that can be done by a machine.

A dear friend of mine is an Egyptologist, and I know his struggles in translating writings from different regions of the empire, let alone differences dynasty to dynasty.

Since even the best computer translators (and I mean the corporately deployed ones, not just freebie Web stuff like BabelFish) mangle all but the simplest Spanish, French and German (I can't say anything about Asian languages, as I can't speak or read any) phrases, how can we expect any level of reliability in translating languages that even leading scholars struggle with?

Besides, the most difficult part of translating anything stems from the fact that any person seldom speaks or writes as he should. The rules of language are bent, twisted and altered into regional dialects and strings of ethnic and cultural phraseology. In the Spanish language, a word may take on one meaning in Mexico, and entirely another in Spain. Nevermind the fact that, at least in my experience, Spanish Spanish is significantly different from Mexican Spanish. And those are two languages that diverged only a matter of hundreds of years ago, as opposed to the thousands often seen in dead languages.

This is very interesting to me, but until we have widely-available computers that can understand the subtle nuances of tone, inflection, humor and colloquialisms, the computer translation will never best, or even come close to a careful academic translation, or a translation done by a human fluent in both languages, if not academically trained in both languages.

A lot of people here are having a good giggle about how lame this translator is..But keep in mind a simple fact before you laugh too loud:

- If the Mars explorer missions find artifacts of a prior civilisation on the face of the red planet... then they are most likely to be culturally similar / identical to Sumerian culture found here on Earth.

Ruins of temples, memorials, grand stadiums, works of art and science - if such things are soon found on mars, then the chances are that they wont be enscribed in m

I was very excited to read the/. headline but honestly, this is rubbish. They've just got a big file in which each row is an English word and an image location -- it doesn't translate at all, it just looks up some *extremely* dubious images based on grepping for an image that matches each word in the input.I don't read cuneiform but for hieroglyphs I swear it's as if they scanned in the pages of some 'The Wonder Of Ancient Egypt' type book and cut them into individual gifs. They didn't even start with a

BTW, in case anyone wants ACTUALLY to learn egyptian hieroglyphic, Gardiner, as someone mentioned above, is the place to start, despite being 50 years old. All the 'idiot's guide to egyptian' type books, or the dover reprints, are crap and totally obsolete. And fresh from my mailbox, here's Gardiner on super discount (in college, I had to pay $100 for it and go without sunday dinner for a month):http://www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~ EIS~~~~NEWSLIST [eisenbrauns.com]

I hear they recently translated a speech by some Governor, addressing a San Francisco parade during a recent California primary election stop...[...]Candidate - Open immigration, mass transit, relief of property taxes at your doorstep, and windmills instead of coal.Mayor - Wrong! Governor! What is best in life?Governor - To brush your enemies, see them drivel before you, and to wear the garmentation of the women.

Not yet, though they are on their way [unicode.org] to being in the standard. As far as sumerian cuneiform, they are already in utf-8 [wikipedia.org], part of the ancient languages section.
"One character encoding to rule them all.";-)

Actually, that makes me wonder about an extra technical aspect. AFAIK, writing in Egypt wasn't left to right, same size. They sometimes wrote left to right (with the faces of the hieroglyphs pointing that way), sometimes right to left (ditto), sometimes vertically, and, here's the kicker, sometimes just turned it all into a sort of a painting. I.e., sometimes the symbols were rearranged, and some some made bigger, some smaller, to get an aesthetic picture.So I'm really curious how they'd help a totally clue

It seems to be a fairly lossy encoding, since just from your examples you have the following mappings:

-ure to -izzle

-gga to -izzle

-ouse to -izzle

-it to -izzle

-ook to -izzle

This being the case I'm surprised it has the expressive ability to represent non-trivial concepts. Or do I mean this bizzle the cizzle I'm surprizzle it has the exprizzle abizzle to reprizzle non-trizzle cizzle?

If you think that's bad, then you haven't encountered any of Britain's various "F" dialects, where the entirety of the human condition is expressed by combining fuck, fucked, fucking, or fucker. These may be used in combination with each other, and no more than two other English words which may only have one syllable each. A major difficulty is that much of the meaning of these dialects is contained not in the words themselves, but the way that pitch changes, varying loudness, and pauses are used to emphasi

Åncient is meant to be semantically equivalent to Latin, with a different symbol set. Translating the symbols into the Latin alphabet is trivial for a machine to do (1:1 mapping). Doing the translation depends on the dialect of Latin. Medieval Latin is one of the easiest languages to machine-parse, due to its very strict and regular grammar rules. Roman Latin is a bit harder, since it was more fluid.